A top-level panel set up by Tony Blair to monitor official aid pledges to the global Live8 campaign will hold its final scheduled session this week with him not having attended a single meeting since 2007.

Convened with great fanfare in the wake of the 2005 G8 summit at Gleneagles, the Africa Progress Panel was charged with ensuring that Western governments did not renege on their promises to pump billions of dollars of extra cash into fighting poverty.

When announced by Mr Blair, who once described Africa as “a scar on the conscience of the world”, he said its remit would be as a high profile watchdog ensuring that Africa’s plight did not “slip out of the headlines”.

Yet the panel, which includes Bob Geldof as a member and has had about £1.5 million of taxpayer funding, faces the prospect of being wound up in Geneva on Wednesday despite only about half of the G8 pledges having been honoured.

Some of those close to the organisation believe that there is no point in it continuing in its current form. At most, they say, it should be scaled down to a few key staff and shed its high-profile membership line-up, which has failed to deliver the clout that was hoped for.

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One insider told The Sunday Telegraph that it had achieved “nothing whatsoever”, and accused Mr Blair of having lost interest in it after setting it up. The former prime minister, who is currently based in Israel as special envoy for the Middle East Quartet, and also holds a large portfolio of other roles, has not attended any of its past four meetings. He has also said he will not attend on Wednesday, despite having returned from Israel last week to give evidence to the Chilcot Inquiry on Iraq.

“Mr Blair has not contributed anything whatsoever to this panel, even to the point of not bothering to turn up to meetings,” said one person with knowledge of the organisation.

“As far as we can see, he got his moment of glory when he launched it and that was that. Partly as a result, the panel itself has hasn’t achieved anything either. Basically, several million dollars have been spent, and nobody in Africa is any better off.”

A spokesman for the Panel said: "The Africa Progress Panel is very active in championing African priorities in the G8, G20 and other fora, whether for fair deals on climate change and trade, helping African countries mitigate the impact of the global economic crisis, or keeping aid commitments.

"Through policy work and discreet high level interventions, the Panel is galvanising support for Africa and for a united African voice on issues critical to the continent's progress. Its work has been praised by bodies as diverse as development banks, business groups, academics and NGOs, as well as having been recognised in a recent external evaluation of the Panel.

"Its current mandate expires in 2010 and its future role is under review."

The panel was formally announced by Mr Blair in June 2006, a year after the Gleneagles G8 summit, and was designed to counter fears from aid agencies that the wealthy nations of the world would quietly forget their promises to donate roughly $50 billion (£31 billion) extra to Africa by 2010.

Funded jointly by Microsoft tycoon Bill Gates and chaired by Kofi Annan, the former UN secretary general, its members also included Michel Camdessus, a former managing director of the International Monetary Fund, Peter Eigen of the anti-corruption body Transparency International, former US treasury chair Robert Rubin, and the former president of Nigeria, Olusegun Obasanjo. The hope was that having such high-profile figures on board would give it both expertise and clout in forcing governments to live up to their commitments.

Announcing the panel, Mr Blair — still prime minister at the time — emphasised the need to ensure that pledges made in the euphoria of the G8 meeting were not forgotten.

“Just because these issues are at the top of the agenda now, it doesn’t mean they couldn’t easily slip down again,” he said. “We must not let that happen.”

Yet those close to the panel’s workings say that the former prime minister has been among its least active members. While Mr Annan and Mr Geldof have given it close attention, panel staff have complained of trouble even getting Mr Blair’s office to reply to emails. “They have even contacted him offering to arrange meetings at times convenient for him, but he hasn’t returned their calls,” said the insider. He attended its first two meetings in 2007, one while still prime minister and not officially a member, but none of the four held since then.

It has also been claimed that Mr Blair could have done more to pressure governments including Italy, which has so far delivered only three per cent of the aid that it promised in 2005. Last year, Mr Geldof won an apology from Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi over the failure after publicly blasting him in a one-to-one exchange. But critics say that had Mr Blair added his voice to the criticisms, it would have carried more weight.

“Geldof criticising a politician is fine, but people know that’s what he’s always done,” said one. “Had Blair brought it up, it might have added a lot to the pressure. If he doesn’t want to create a fuss in Italy, fine, but then why create this show of a panel?”

A spokesman for the former prime minister said: “Tony Blair attended the December 2007 Berlin meeting after joining the panel. He remains engaged in the work of the Africa Progress Panel.”

Speaking to The Sunday Telegraph, Mr Geldof defended Mr Blair’s role and the panel. “You can always say these kind of bodies could have done more, and when I first joined I did have my doubts,” he said. “But it isn’t either Tony Blair or Kofi Annan’s style to criticise in the way I do, and the panel’s clout does mean that we get access to people whom we might not otherwise see. “It is important to have a body that monitors aid pledges, and whether Mr Blair attends meetings in person isn’t that relevant. He is still working behind the scenes, and without him this organisation wouldn’t have been set up in the first place.”

Some aid agencies, however, say there is no doubt that the panel has not acquired much of a profile as a watchdog. Although it has produced annual reports on governance and aid donations, those of other bodies such as U2 singer Bono’s “One” campaign have had more public impact.

“I think it is probably fair to say the Africa Progress Panel has fallen off the map a bit,” said Patrick Watt, the director of development policy at Save the Children UK. “Its reports are not very widely referenced among advocacy organisations working around G8 pledge issues.”

While Britain is broadly on track to meet its G8 aid targets, both Italy and France are falling short, and the global economic downturn has raised fears that other pledges will be broken. Aid groups say that scrutiny has been complicated over disputes about how much of G8 aid cash was “new money”, and how much was existing aid commitments or debt write-offs.